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Nonlinear metasurfaces have experienced rapid growth recently due to their potential in various applications, including infrared imaging and spectroscopy. However, due to the low conversion efficiencies of metasurfaces, several strategies have been adopted to enhance their performances, including employing resonances at signal or nonlinear emission wavelengths. This strategy results in a narrow operational band of the nonlinear metasurfaces, which has bottlenecked many applications, including nonlinear holography, image encoding, and nonlinear metalenses. Here, we overcome this issue by introducing a new nonlinear imaging platform utilizing a pump beam to enhance signal conversion through four-wave mixing (FWM), whereby the metasurface is resonant at the pump wavelength rather than the signal or nonlinear emissions. As a result, we demonstrate broadband nonlinear imaging for arbitrary objects using metasurfaces. A silicon disk-on-slab metasurface is introduced with an excitable guided-mode resonance at the pump wavelength. This enabled direct conversion of a broad IR image ranging from >1000 to 4000 nm into visible. Importantly, adopting FWM substantially reduces the dependence on high-power signal inputs or resonant features at the signal beam of nonlinear imaging by utilizing the quadratic relationship between the pump beam intensity and the signal conversion efficiency. Our results, therefore, unlock the potential for broadband infrared imaging capabilities with metasurfaces, making a promising advancement for next-generation all-optical infrared imaging techniques with chip-scale photonic devices.
Zheng et al. (Tue,) studied this question.